185 – He’s the king of franchises: Tom interviews Joel Stewart

Episode 185 – Joel Stewart
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody, it's Tom here with episode 185 of Screw the Commute podcast. I'm here with Joel Stewart. Now Joel is the franchise guy. The franchise guy. I've got eight questions on franchises. He is your guy. I'll introduce him to you in a minute and please tell your friends about this podcast. If anybody wants to start a business or they're struggling and they want to improve their business, you've got the right place. We've got tons of stuff on Mondays. I do an in-depth training session on something that's either made me a fortune or saved me a fortune. And then on Wednesdays and Fridays, I do interviews with great entrepreneurs like Joel. So you can three times a week you can get a shot at Tom and his guests now are podcast app's in the Apple store. You can go to screwthecommute.com/app where we have complete instructions to show you how to use all the fancy features so you can take us with you on the road and save your favorite episodes. And I mean, if you're in the car, you're listening and then the phone rings, that'll stop. And then you do your phone call and then it'll start playing the podcast right where you left off. Just all kinds of good stuff there. So check that out at screwthecommute.com/app. And I got a big freebie to thank you for listening to the podcast. It's my twenty seven dollar e-book, How to Automate Your Business. And just one of the tips in this e-book has saved me over a list of this seven and a half million keystrokes and certainly carpal tunnel. It's called How to Automate Your Business. And it's allowed all the things in there have allowed me to handle up to fifty thousand subscribers and 40000 customers without tearing my hair out. So check that out at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and if you scroll down, I got another little surprise bonus for you that some people charge for five and six thousand bucks for. And you're going to get it right there. All right. Our sponsor's the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia, and we're approved by the Department of Defense to participate in the my CAA military spouse scholarship program. Now, just as my thank you to veterans and we give the school we give a ninety five hundred dollar scholarship to military spouses, veterans, law enforcement and first responders. That's just from the school. And then if you're an eligible military spouse, the DOD gives you four thousand dollars towards your education. So so you can get a total of thirteen thousand five hundred dollars towards your education. And this education with Internet marketing is totally portable. In fact, the Department of Defense demands that it's portable. So you don't get screwed over taking crappy jobs every time you get deployed somewhere. You can check all that out at IMTCVA.org/military. Now just because it's in Virginia doesn't mean you can't study anywhere. It's a distance learning school. So anywhere you get an internet connection, you can participate. And of course, we'll have everything we talk about in the show notes this is episode 185. So to go directly to the show notes, you go to screwthecommute.com/185. You can see all Joel's stuff and all our links that we talk about.

[00:03:47] All right. Let's get to the main event. Joel Stewart is the military veteran, engineer, MBA and certified franchise consultant with the International Franchise Professionals Group and founder of the International Franchise Marketplace. His franchise consulting business is focused on two niches, military veterans and international franchise marketing. And any questions you have about this? He is your guy. Joel, are you ready to screw. The commute.

[00:04:22] All right. Great meeting you. I think you referred to me by Steven Kuhn, who is a great guy. I've met a veteran and he said, hey, this is the guy you got to talk to this guy. So tell everybody what you do now and then we'll take you back, see how you came up through the ranks.

[00:04:40] Sure. Yeah. So what I'm doing now is I am a certified franchise consultant and that the main thing that I do here in the United States is I find people that are looking for either a way to break out of where they are in investment opportunities or people looking to either transition out of their job and into their own business or perhaps are unemployed looking for a business or transitioning out of the military. I'm looking for what their next step is going to be. And I am basically like a headhunter. Like, you know, hey, you have W-2 head hunters that go around and they try to find you job placements. I do something very similar for franchisors. I work with about 400 of them and I try to find them franchisees. So I'll meet with people I'll learn about their goals or financial situation, their background, their history. And then I'll I'll take that and I'll I'll try to find what are the best matches to try to get them where they want to go in the budget that they have through using franchise business ownership as a vehicle.

[00:05:45] So tell everybody what you feel the the the big benefits of franchises are.

[00:05:51] Well, it's something that is proven. So there's a bunch of benefits. I was actually talking with somebody yesterday about this. And he's like, you know, I kind of see franchises as like a cookie and go to the store and you can buy this this free baked cookie that you is regular standard. You know, it's gonna be good. Or you can go and put in the work and make your own cookies at home. It's kind of hard to mess up the premade cookie you just take out of the box and eat it. And that's really kind of what franchising is for business. So you have these businesses are proven and in multiple markets, sometimes hundreds or thousands of markets, they really have their processes down and you just have to get into them and follow them. And when I first got into franchise consulting a few years ago, when I started, the first thing I did is, as I said, you know, I've got to figure out who it is to my franchisors want to find. And when I asked franchisors who they're their top type of candidate would be almost 75 percent of them. The first thing that came out of their mouth was veterans. We want veterans.

[00:06:54] It's probably because they know they know how to work.

[00:06:57] Oh, yeah, exactly. For several reasons. You know that when you're in the military and you go from duty station to duty station, you show up at a new job. They may be somewhat familiar work, but, you know, you don't really know exactly how to do it. And they say this is how you do it to be successful. You do it and you're successful. And that's really what it is with franchising is when you get into it, military people are much more likely to just go and do it and be successful. And that's what it really boils down to, because when you're in the business world, it's nice to think, oh, yeah, we're supporting veterans, we're doing this. We're doing that. And what it comes down to is veteran franchisees make more money, they're more successful. And that's why franchise owners want them, because as they have told me they can replicate systems in ways that civilian franchisees just have a hard time doing well.

[00:07:57] So I was going to this a highly regulated industry. All right. So so I was going to start a franchise with a unique business. I had a long time ago. And when I started looking into what it took to actually franchise. Wow, lot of regulations, a lot of things. So that I guess that's another layer of protection for you that fly by nighters would have a harder time getting into the franchise. Right?

[00:08:21] You know, a long time ago, if you were to look back to when franchising really got its roots in franchising really started probably hundreds of years ago with very few want to try to give way back, but it didn't really come into its own until the 70s. And at that time, if you could just get someone to pay you the franchise fee, they would open a franchise. Didn't have to be proven. It didn't have to be anything. And so there were people that would be hard selling, there would be people that would be doing scams. And all of that has pretty much been eliminated there. There's a lot of reasons to not try to scam people as a lot of reasons for franchise owners to make sure that they're getting the right franchisees per system. A couple of those would be that if a franchise system fails, all of that data is collected. There is a data collection group called Brand Data, and they send these statistics out to all of the lenders. So if there's a franchise system and they've got franchisees failing that, all that information, no one else sees it but the lenders. And then it starts getting more difficult for that franchise to get loans for their startups or for the new franchisees. So that's just one way that they're punished. Another way is that there is a lot of stuff that has to be disclosed now with the modern franchise disclosure document. You really can't hide anything. There's lawsuits if there are. Leaving your system. It's all there in black and white. Renewed every year for people to be able to see. And then when they do validation, they start calling franchisees. They want a good record. So franchisors are looking for good franchisees, not just anybody that can write a check. And it's become it's they made it so regulated in order to kind of make that environment.

[00:10:04] So just because it's regulated, though, that doesn't mean that there aren't some better and worse franchises. So I'm sure you're immersed in it so much, you know, how to point somebody to the better ones, right?

[00:10:15] Right. Yeah, of course. Yeah. There's something like three thousand eight hundred ish and it grows every day. Franchises in the United States.

[00:10:24] Yeah. If you tried to figure that out yourself. Which ones are really good. God help you. Right.

[00:10:30] Yeah. Well that's that's why I do what I do. Right. At first blush people hear, oh you headhunt for like four hundred franchisors. They think that that's a large number, which is a large number. When you find out that there's three thousand eight hundred out there, you think, oh, that's actually only a little over 10 percent of the total number of franchisors that are out there. So, you know, it's it's there's a lot of options out there. And what I try to do is I try to figure out looking at different industries, different investment levels. What is the franchise that position the best and has the best history And for somebody.

[00:11:08] I know you said that, you know, you kind of punish them if they're bad by alerting the lenders, don't some of them self finance.

[00:11:16] Yes, self-financing does happen, there's there's a couple that I can think of, the service master brands like to sell finance. So I work with two of those service master clean and furniture medic. So those two will do self-financing. Most don't finance internally unless they're brand new. So brand new, a brand new franchise when their truck when they go out there and they're thrown out into the public world of franchising. They're competing against other concepts. So how is it you differentiate yourself or how do you recruit those first couple franchise owners that are so key to being able to validate your brand and self financing is one of the ways. New franchisors kind of hit that. But if you go to self finance rule or starting up, really, really well capitalized to make that happen. So it's kind of a barrier, I think self financing may have been more common previously, but nowadays I don't see it all that much. But financing isn't really difficult for franchise businesses. Banks actually really like franchise businesses and with SBA loans, that will take a lot of that risk. It's really easy to get financing,.

[00:12:41] Right, because it's a proven system. Right. And then they can get. They can always check up on it. So what are some of the things, though, potential franchisees have to watch out for?

[00:12:51] So there's there's several steps of the franchise process through through the discovery process, we call it where we're franchisees, potential franchisees can find out about the franchise. And the most important step, in my opinion, is validation. And this is where they are. They can validate that all the things the franchise are saying are true. So the franchisor is saying, we're going to teach you all of these things, every single aspect of the business. You don't have to have any history. How do you know that's true? Unless you call up existing franchisees in the validation process and just kind of pick their brain? And that's one of the things that's going to be in the franchise disclosure document, is all of the existing franchisees with at least an email for you to just email and say, I'm looking into your system. You can just give me a few minutes to talk about it and they can do it. But the things to watch out for. One of the things I look at one is, is the item 19. The item 19 is financial performance statistics and the franchise disclosure document. It used to be really rare for franchise owners to put data in there, but not so much anymore. There's thirty eight hundred franchises out there. There's a few that don't, but most do. And those have sometimes it's useful information, sometimes not. So sometimes they'll they'll post whole profit loss statements for all their franchisees, which I've seen. It goes on for pages and pages and pages. And sometimes they'll just say, here's our average revenues. Which by itself is a kind of a useless number.

[00:14:20] Every revenues 2 million. But our expenses were five. Yeah.

[00:14:25] You can use those numbers in combination with validation to try to get a good feel. So if they say their average revenues are five million dollars and you call the franchisees up and you just say, hey, you know, kind of margins and then you get directly from them, because here's something that a lot of people understand. Franchisors can't they legally can't tell you anything that's not in the item 19. So they can't say, oh, you're going to make 10 million dollar. Right. Unless it's in black and white proven statistics that it's there. But the franchisees and validation can tell you as much as they want about their specific situation. So they can say these are my margins here, my revenues. Here's how I'm doing. So. So that's where you can take if it is kind of vague, you can kind of double down on that. But if it is really vague, if they only have a gross revenue number, you know, you've got to do some extra calls and the validation process.

[00:15:18] Could still could be legitimate. But yeah, you got to dig deeper.

[00:15:21] It could just be that it's hard to quantify. So like there's there's one franchise or that I'm currently working with Home Vestors, which I like a lot. This is a good work from home one to people that want to screw the commute. If you're familiar with the phrase we buy ugly houses. So they've got this really awesome system for finding distressed sellers. And it's a win win. These people really to sell their house fast. They sell it fast for cash that people get it, they flip it. It's it's a win win for everybody. But it was really hard for them to get actual metrics off of that. You know, how much how much are you going to put in to marketing versus how much is the house and sell for when it actually sells what you buy for? How much that you go into flipping it? They could put out these really exhaustive surveys to all their franchisees and try to compile the data. It's just difficult. And so in those cases where gathering the data is just difficult. You have put extra work into the validation process with just making sure that you make the phone calls or send the emails and then get a good feel from the franchisees.

[00:16:26] So what's a range of investments that people need to make?

[00:16:31] The range of investments it can. It can. It really varies. So say like service master clean, they do commercial cleaning with they do 80 percent internal financing. So for a veteran, somewhere between five and six thousand out of pocket, I've got another one that's really inexpensive. American Express cruise planners for they have a veteran discount and internal financing. Get out 3900 out of pocket. I work with my favorite brand that I work with because it was my favorite restaurant college Bennigan's. You know, their look, that's a that's a casual dining area. Two million dollar investment. Oh, yeah. That's where there's this whole range of all types of franchises, whether it's coaching or construction or personal services, pets, you name it. There's dozens of different industries you can get into that have all kinds of investment ranges. And that's one of the important things that I do, is I look at people's financial situation and I say, given your goals, what you want to do and your ability to invest, here's what I'm recommending. And I can kind of point towards the right thing. Things to watch out for. Two other things want to point out is in the beginning of the franchise disclosure document. There's going to be a section on lawsuits. And that's an important thing to look at. If there are all kinds of lawsuits and you see the franchises paying out millions and millions in lawsuit settlements might be something to be wary of.

[00:18:06] And then the other thing is in the I think it's item 20 of the franchise disclosure document. There's a list where they talk about the overall franchise system. They'll say, here's some. And we have or last four years we've added this many. We've lost this many. We've transferred this many. So get the two numbers to look at there. And my opinion are the losses and the transfers. The losses are obviously bad. And it could just mean that people are retired and they closed down or could mean that people weren't successful. So there's a high number of losses. You've got to be wary. The other thing is transfers. You know, transfers is a way that franchise owners can try to hide failing businesses. If they you know, if they try, they get they can try to sell that license to somebody else at a discounted rate or even maybe even get an investment group to buy. There are ways to use the transfer system to try to hide losses and the high number of transfers. Some transfers is normal because if you buy a business, you want to have an exit strategy, you want to be able to sell it, which eventual transfer. But if you know, if there's a transfer number that's, you know, 30, 40 percent of the system. You know, there's probably a problem that their hiding.

[00:19:16] So if somebody buys a franchise and then builds it up really good and does want to sell it. How does that work? Is it automatic that they're allowed to or does the franchise or have to approve or what? How does that work?

[00:19:29] Yes. So selling it is very much like selling any other business. And the only the only real difference is that the franchisor generally this is gonna be in the franchise purchase agreement, the franchisor generally needs to approve the new buyer. So if somebody is coming to you and they say, hey, I got this hundred thousand dollar line of credit, you've got a business here that I think is worth a hundred thousand, I to take this out and buy you buy your franchise. But now I'm fully leveraged. The franchise is going to look at that and say, hey, we have middle net worth requirements of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. This person doesn't meet our requirements. They're not allowed to be a franchisee so they could shoot down potential buyers if they don't meet their minimum requirement.

[00:20:15] Yeah, sure. All right. So let me take you back. So were you an entrepreneurial kid?

[00:20:21] You know, not a lot. I was I was always someone that I was kind of one of those characters that you might consider the class clown or whatever. I'd like to have fun. You know, I like to try to be funny, as I pointed out. I was just telling you about the book you inspired me to finally publish. There were a couple of years ago the vegetable hating meat eater's guide to lazy juicing. Yeah, I like adding or inducing a little humor in everything I do. But no, I when I was getting up out of high school, there are two things that are really one thing I really wanted to maybe two. One was again, the voice acting is I love doing impersonations. I love different voices.

[00:21:04] Come on and give us the sample. Now, you can't bring that up and not give us the sample.

[00:21:08] Not to tell you if you could buy a franchise. I going to get to the chopper. I'm going to get you.

[00:21:17] That's my favorite one. I've lost some of them over the years.

[00:21:20] You've got to have a good Scooby Doo to everybody.

[00:21:23] And I did a commercial for my dad a while ago. I didn't like it. He had me do some celebrity impersonations. I think I did. Sean Connery and then my Arnold Schwarzenegger one.

[00:21:36] Just so everybody knows that wasn't really Arnold Schwarzenegger visiting screw the commute podcast.

[00:21:43] It could be. Screw the commute.

[00:21:50] So. OK. So you went up through school. I mean, it was an entrepreneurial family and all that.

[00:21:56] Well, now it seems that way because now my mom and my dad have different businesses. My mom is a real estate broker and my dad's got a business making jam. And that's what I made that commercial for. Go to simplyjam.net. And he has handcrafted helping with jams. And he said when I was growing up now my dad worked for the state. My mom had some jobs working for banks and supermarkets and a couple of different things, in their finance apartments. That's kind of weird. It's kind of like after we got out of the house, everyone is free to just be entrepreneurs.

[00:22:33] So how did you get the. You through school?

[00:22:37] So I guess the logic in me won out and I didn't I didn't mean to talk to you and tell it that I'm a well married man because I recognized I still do it subconsciously.

[00:22:49] All right. So. So you got through school or the head, you get into the service.

[00:22:53] Yeah. So the logic in me won out because I thought to myself I could go to something like engineering where I know I'm always going to have a secure financial future. Or I could go into acting where it's kind of a long shot. Maybe I make it. Maybe I don't. It's just random luck kind of deal? And the logic went out. I went into engineering, so I went to Rochester Institute Technology for Mechanical Engineering. And when I was going through that, I started thinking, do I really want to just work for somebody else so that they make more money than me my whole life? And I really didn't. So that's what I called the first seeds of being an entrepreneur. I kind of realized that I'm an employee. I'm always going to be making less than I'm worth because otherwise they wouldn't hire. It's kind of hard of a job as you hire people, but they can make you money and you pay them less than they're worth. So that you get. But instead of becoming an entrepreneur, I joined the Navy. So I joined a profession where I could use my engineering degree. I joined the Navy where I could use my engineering degree, but not actually do engineering, not go work as an employee. And I did that for another about seven years. So that kind of got out of the Navy is when we moved back to where my family was so my kids could be around the grandparents and in where I was living, there wasn't a lot of job opportunities, some of my qualifications.

[00:24:21] I'd done government construction contracting. I've done public works, department management, safety staff with an engineering degree. And if I wanted to commute screw the commute, if I wanted to commute an hour and a half. I could get a good job. But I did not want to commute an hour and a half to a job. So I started looking at what I could do, where I wouldn't have to have that drive. So the natural thing was to get into real estate. So my mom was doing so. I got my MBA and then I went into real estate and as into commercial real estate in my first listing, had a potential business for sale. I don't know anything about selling businesses. So I started looking into becoming a certified business intermediary through the International Business Brokers Association and I started on that track. And that's where I discovered franchising. And then it just kind of clicked. When you find something that you're passionate about that you enjoy. I just decided to start putting my energy towards that. So I still dabble a little bit in commercial real estate. I don't really do much in business brokerage anymore, but the franchising stuff I discovered I really liked it. I really like helping people. I like that I'm 100 percent value added member of the teams that don't cost anybody in money.

[00:25:34] Right. Yeah. You're paid by the franchisor.

[00:25:37] Yeah. So I helped them accomplish their dreams and goals. And if I successfully do that, someone else pays me to do it.

[00:25:43] It's like an affiliate. Basically, it doesn't cost them user any anymore. But. But you get paid from the seller.

[00:25:51] Yeah. So that's exactly how it works. So I enjoy that arrangement. I like just helping people and having someone else pay me to help them. So that's what I've really sunk myself into.

[00:26:04] It sounds good. So we're going to take a brief sponsor break when we come back. We're going to ask Joel, what's a typical day look like for him and how he stays motivated.

[00:26:12] So, folks, this is Vetrepreneurs Month, as Joel is here as part of Vetrepreneurs Month. I want to tell you a little bit more about how my school supports military families and how our training can help them. I mean, first of all, we give a 50 percent or a ninety five hundred dollar scholarship to thank them for their service. And this applies to active duty or veterans. And then for eligible military spouses, the DOD gives them an additional 4000. So the reason this is perfect for military families then and I know this firsthand living in the Virginia Beach Norfolk area, where we get probably the biggest collection of military in the world, spouses around here normally have to take crappy jobs at lower than average pay because employers know they're going to get deployed. So the employers don't want to invest a lot of money in people they know are going to be leaving. So so then the spouse gets deployed and has to find another crappy job at a new location.

[00:27:11] This really sucks. So with Internet marketing training, companies don't care where you live. I mean, you can still be handling social media and email marketing and shopping cart stuff and customer service and all the other things. Every business on earth needs. And not only that, you can study at home with no expenses for books, travel or childcare. I mean, it's perfect for military families. And another thing, you can also sell your own products and services with the exact same skills you learn. So check it all out at IMTCVA.org/military. Of course that'll be in the show notes and then give me a call. I'd really be thrilled to support your military family and tell you all about.

[00:27:58] All right, let's get back to the main event. Joe Stewart's here and he is a franchise guy. He's going to tell you he's got 400 potential franchises. He could help you pick the right one for your situation, your skill set, your financial situation. And and so, Joel, what's a typical day look like for you?

[00:28:18] Well, a typical day is a roll out of bed and get to work now. But so I. My days kind of fall into those two niches that you said when you when you announced or introduced, I should say, is working with coordinating with veterans and working on my international marketing. So a lot of it is coordination or consulting calls. So when I get a consulting call, usually I try to have someone before that call fill out a profile. I am a certified franchise navigator, so they have a profile called Connect Me. And it's basically they're done with a disc profile. You like, but it's geared towards franchise. Franchise Central developed. They've been doing franchise stuff. Behavioral sciences has been their specialties, especially in the franchise world since I think they were founded in 1988. But the guy's been doing it since 82 or maybe even earlier. But they've got this great system. They've got about 100 franchisors that have profiles set up in the system to identify high performing candidate profiles. So people will fill it out. I'll get notified if there is a match, the high performing profile for any of their specific franchises. But if not, I can read the profile and get a good feel for kind of their drive, their sales style, their team building aptitude or preference, and they're in their need to have what they do matter in some greater sense or their desire just to make money. So it kind of breaks it down for me and allows me to connect them. Normally that costs like 50 dollars, but as a certified navigator, I pay the money upfront and I'll just allow people to take it for free. So for any of these resources, actually a good chance me to say my website. IntegrityCommercial.biz.

[00:30:22] Okay. That'll be in the show notes for everybody. What will they find there?

[00:30:27] So what they're going to find is they're gonna find a couple of things are going to find a browsing franchise list that has most of my franchises. So not all the franchises I work with are there, but probably ninety five percent of them. And they can go through buy type. You know, they want to look for work from home. They want to look for something in the pet industry or education or business support, that kind of stuff. They can browse by topic and just kind of look through the different franchisors I work with. The second thing I have is I have a funding tool that's powered by Benetrends. So Benetrends, Entrepreneur magazine just ranked them number three in the franchise lending category, which is pretty big. I work with with most of the top couple, actually. FranFunds was number one. I worked with them. But Benetrends has this great funding tool that you can go through and then you can kind of putting your financial information. I'll tell you what you're pre-qualified for right there based on the information you put in. So that's I think is a really great tool for people looking to try to figure out what size investment they might qualify for.

[00:31:31] And then the last thing is I've got some extra little information there and a link to schedule a franchise consultation. And in that link, you will you'll get another link to this profile. The franchise navigator profile. And this. It only takes about 10 minutes. And it really does give me a great breakdown of of where you are. There's an intake survey involved. So I'll know kind of where you are sitting financially, what your goals are. And also your profile, which I can then correlate to everything. So anyway, so this all feeds into my average day, right. So that's what a franchise consultation looks like. Hopefully you've taken that survey. I can go through it with you. And we can I can start getting some good background information so that I can then start doing some research on your behalf. Sometimes I'll throw out concepts here and there just to get your feel for them to see see what your thoughts are.

[00:32:30] Where do you live? The East Coast.

[00:32:33] I'm up in Connecticut.

[00:32:34] Ok, so east coast time zone. Yeah. All right. I got a two part question for you. Sure. One is, is do you represent or are there a lot of franchises available outside the US? And the second part is, are there a lot of people that are non U.S. citizens wanting to buy U.S. franchises?

[00:32:56] Oh, yes. So yes and yes. OK. So that's one of the things. So other than taking franchise consultation calls, I do educational stuff where I listen to your podcast, for instance, or I researched my franchisors. Right now I'm doing research on a webinar series and we're putting together work from home franchises. So I've got about one hundred and fifty ish franchises that could be work from home in various aspects. When you look into the work. Franchisors, various ways that they can connect and screwing the commute as some are kind of true work from home. Others are more likely to do some traveling to do some sales. But it's mostly work from home. Others is your coordinating the business for home. Like, say, construction.

[00:33:42] Yeah, yeah, I know. It's just the, uh, the the grind of the everyday commute that I'm so much against.

[00:33:49] Certainly going to manage your own schedule. It's really hard. It's like my biggest fear in life is becoming a W2 employee.

[00:33:56] How do you stay motivated?

[00:34:01] Well, my kids are always motivating my wife the need to pay bills. Yeah, but honestly, I really like to help people. So I was talking about my. I took that that survey for myself, the one I was telling you about, the behavioral assessment. They've got this contributor score. And the contributor is a measure of how much of what you do has to make a difference. So if you're scoring like a fifty five, sixty five, what you do you know is a nice add on, but you don't really care. You just really just want to make money between sixty five and seventy five. It's, it's a deciding factor. You want what you do to make money. It's not a driving force but you do want it to be there. And then above seventy five score. It's a driving force helping helping people, making sure that what you do has a greater impact on society. Everything is a driving force and above 90, you're not really entrepreneurial. You're gonna be an activist. You're gonna be saving the whales and doing something like that. I scored in at an eighty two, so I'm not quite. Save the whales. But helping people is a driving force behind why I do what I do. And that's really what keeps you motivated is just trying to help people. Yeah. So then the other thing is the international part. So I do have a business I started recently called the International Franchise Marketplace. I started it because I just kind of a random connection.

[00:35:24] A friend of mine is the executive director of Newmont American Business Center, and I worked with her to pull off this great conference back in April and month. And I kind of realized I was onto something there for being able to provide low cost international expose or exposure for franchise owners. And I networked with another guy in the tribe who's involved in the American Chamber of Commerce in Thailand. And I'm doing in Thailand, Bahrain, and I'm going back in October. But outside of that franchisors are very much are looking outside the United States. Mexico and Canada are easy ones. If you're up there and you wanna start a franchise, I work with a lot of franchise owners looking to expand to Canada, Mexico. Outside of that, it shrinks considerably. I mean, I would say probably for the Middle East or Southeast Asian market. We are looking at know, I am probably working about 30 of 40 franchisors that are really interested, and I've got more than if I brought them somebody, they would probably say yes. When you get into international expansion, especially into other non North American countries, there's a lot of unknowns when it comes to the legal format. The cultural preferences. There's a lot that can go into that on the franchisor side. And not everybody is really looking to do that right away. So that's kind of where the international landscape was.

[00:36:50] I can think of some interesting ones. I would start in Bangkok, but I'm not sure they get approved. So, anyway, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us about this. We've never had anybody on the talked about this before. I didn't realize you could get in for, you know, a relatively low amount. I thought everything started 20, 40, 50 thousand dollars. So. So it's good to know that there's a wider range.

[00:37:22] Yeah. Well, some of the ones that the listeners of this podcast might be interested in is more of looking at franchising as an Empire Building slash investment option. There's a lot of franchises, especially in the food and fitness space and, you know, personal care, beauty, that type of stuff that are kind of built to be semi passive passive ownership where you're looking at spending maybe five to 10 hours a week owning multiple locations. And then that might be a good thing to look into. There's a lot in those those industries that you're not going to be managing. You're not going to be in there every day, but it could be another revenue stream or another way that someone might build their their business empire.

[00:38:08] Totally, totally. Good to know. So thanks so much, man, for coming on. Check everybody. Given the Web site again.

[00:38:14] integritycommercial.biz.

[00:38:16] That is integritycommercial.biz. And that's Joel Stewart. So thanks so much. And we really appreciate it. I don't like to be cliche about it, but truly, we appreciate your service to the country and all the things you're doing for vets.

[00:38:32] All right. I appreciate you having me on this podcast.

[00:38:34] All right. So, hey, everybody. So we will catch you all in the next episode. Check out integritycommercial.biz. There we go. All right. Catch y'all on the next episode. See ya later.

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